


Quod Gratis Asseritur, Gratis Negatur

by summerstorm



Category: American Idol RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, Community: help_haiti, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-02-01
Updated: 2010-02-01
Packaged: 2017-10-06 22:35:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,869
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/58474
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/summerstorm/pseuds/summerstorm
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"I can't leave yet, can I?" Kris asked when Adam walked by his desk, voice dry and resigned. Adam was pretty sure it was just him and Kris left in a four-room radius, so it wasn't a strange way for Kris to react to seeing him there.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Quod Gratis Asseritur, Gratis Negatur

**Author's Note:**

> Written for [**daemonicangel**](http://daemonicangel.livejournal.com/), who gracefully donated to [](http://community.livejournal.com/help_haiti/profile)[**help_haiti**](http://community.livejournal.com/help_haiti/) in exchange for a politics AU and claimed she didn't mind if I borrowed heavily from The West Wing. Thanks to [**katayla**](http://katayla.livejournal.com/) for suggesting this episode and [**annemaris**](http://annemaris.livejournal.com/) for the read-through. &lt;3

"I can't leave yet, can I?" Kris asked when Adam walked by his desk, voice dry and resigned. Adam was pretty sure it was just him and Kris left in a four-room radius, so it wasn't a strange way for Kris to react to seeing him there.

"That depends," Adam said. "Do you want to keep your job?"

Kris furrowed his brows. "Yes," he said warily, dropping the jacket he was holding over the back of a chair.

"Good," said Adam, nodding. "Do you have any funny to contribute to the Correspondents' Dinner speech?"

There was a blink of acknowledgment, first, and then Adam watched as Kris seemed to study his options before settling on "No".

"Then I'm going to need you to hang around for moral support."

Kris's chuckle sounded tired, like he was really looking forward to getting home for the night, and Adam felt a little guilty for keeping him from his plans. It lasted about a second and a half, and then Kris picked up a pile of binders and started walking, and Adam had to focus on catching up with him so his self-assigned break from duty wouldn't be cut short by Kris's sudden professionalism.

"So, hey, what did you think of my gift?" he asked, carefully bouncing into Kris's line of vision. "Did you like it? I know it was kind of random, but I saw it online and I thought of you."

Adam had planned on asking about it later, like the following week later, because Kris had been kind of pissy all day and it was entirely possible it was Adam's fault. Adam's gift's fault. Honesty was great and all, but Adam generally preferred to be showered with gratefulness and praise when that was an option.

In this particular case, though, Adam found himself favoring the chance to think about something other than the fact that he was going to be stuck in the White House for another however many hours trying to rewrite a speech into something that wouldn't send a roomful of people into the ER for symptoms akin to a mild Xanax overdose.

Kris narrowed his eyes like he was trying to come up with a way to let him down easy, and Adam raised an eyebrow.

"It," Kris began, steps coming to a halt to rummage in a nearby desk, "would have been better if the delivery guy had brought it upstairs himself."

"He didn't?" Adam gasped. He'd spent good money on that fucking thing; it totally covered transportation up six flights of stairs. It wasn't Kris's fault he had such poor taste in living arrangements. "You didn't tip him, did you? You totally did."

Kris scowled at him. It was a well-deserved gesture, Adam thought.

What he chose to say was, "What's with the face?"

"Why would you send me a coat stand?" Kris asked, sounding genuinely baffled. "I have no need for a coat stand. You could have kept the Correspondents' Dinner speech from sucking in the time you spent getting me a freaking coat stand."

Adam grinned. "But it's our workaversary!" he explained. "Why, Kristopher, don't tell me you forgot."

"Right," Kris said, rolling his eyes. "That would be a serious offense, seeing how that's totally a real thing."

"Exactly!" Adam said cheerfully. He hadn't missed the sarcasm in Kris's voice, but it was always more fun to take his words at face value. "I'm glad you see it my way. Besides, the coat stand and your door are a match made in cheap furniture heaven."

Kris snorted. "I'm sure my door appreciates your matchmaking, but you really shouldn't have—"

"Shh," Adam said. "I'm trying to come up with a good reason to invite myself over so I can surreptitiously drag the stand where it belongs and you probably didn't put it."

"If you were at all capable of doing anything surreptitiously, that would have ruined your chances."

"Well, I want to recondition your apartment, not make you think you got a visit from your friendly neighborhood burglars."

Kris shook his head and turned on his heels, saying, "That's time you could be using to fix that boring speech," and Adam had no choice but to drop the subject for the time being and get back to work.

~

The first step towards making an existing mediocre speech _good_ was trying to come up with better jokes.

The second step was coffee. Preferably black and intravenous, but needles tended to reflect badly on one's public image and Adam actually liked coffee that didn't taste much like actual coffee best, so he usually grabbed a latte and let it last a while. It was a waste of a step, all in all, but Lil seemed to lose perspective on things when he didn't observe it.

If the second step was, as expected, not enough to make some progress on the first, Adam advanced to step #3: get endorsement on what he already had. It was entirely possible he was having a random bout of low self-esteem, and somebody else would tell him he was being stupid and his speech was a riot. Or would cause a riot, depending on his intent.

Still, the White House at this hour was inhabited by stale air, darkness, busy little bees who'd rather be at home and busy big bees who would rip your head off if you bothered them with nonsense, which always proved to be a huge problem when Adam needed an ego boost. Lil had written about a third of the thing, so she was blinded to the entirety of it by overly harsh self-criticism. Kris had been in the room when the remainder of the Communications staff had read the speech and clouded their judgment by making witty, annoyingly cute comments on the most insipid passages that Adam couldn't actually work into said passages. The President was locked in the oval office in the kind of company that automatically stuck an invisible DO NOT DISTURB sign on the door, and the President's new aide had the most conservative sense of humor Adam had ever had the misfortune of stumbling across in a kid his age.

That left Megan Joy, the current media director, who was awesome but very much not fit for public consumption, and David Cook, who had that amused-by-the-world-at-large expression on his face that usually meant he'd just had a not-date with Carrie Underwood and she'd managed to focus on him and control her impulses to ask for inside scoop on the prez.

"I would say that is funny," Cook told Adam about the intro, "but I think the Constitution frowns upon lying and I don't want to give Kelly any more reasons to fire me."

Which brought Adam back to the first step, and Lil's perfectionism, and Kris's bizarre passive-aggressive behavior.

It was going to be a long, long night.

~

One more hour getting nowhere later, Lil's fingers were twitching to get ahold of a bottle of Scotch, Adam could tell. It wouldn't have been a big deal, except her divorce wasn't quite finalized and one of the main points in her child custody case was her ex-husband's bouts of alcoholism, so she flat-out refused to consume a single drop of alcohol for any reason at all.

It would all probably be easier if Kelly were there to help out instead of holed up in the oval office arguing about whether the President should let his eighteen-year-old daughter have an abortion her mother openly told Adam just days before she desperately wanted to have.

Technically, he had the option of texting Kelly, but he was pretty sure she was the only person talking sense in that room and not prioritizing public opinion over the poor girl's right to fix her own mistake as she saw fit, and that was more important than making the daunting task of coming up with decent jokes easy on him.

"This is such a waste of a speech," Adam despaired. "I'm wasting the President's evening. Hell, I'm wasting _Tina Fey_'s evening. If she so much as almost nods off, I'm terminating my own contract first thing in the morning."

"You can always send her an apology coat stand," Kris offered.

Adam laughed in disbelief. "Are you seriously pissed about the coat stand? I was going for original and personal, not so-useless-you-might-as-well-stick-it-up-your-ass, which is nonetheless what you seem to have done with it."

Kris laughed dryly, barely a loud puff of breath with no involvement from his vocal chords. "It's just so—" he tried.

"It's just so...?" Adam prompted. When Kris didn't answer, he continued, "It's just so 'pause'. That sheds light on a hell of a lot of things."

"Which is, go figure, something a coat stand certainly won't do," Kris quipped. "Besides, I started working for you in January."

"Ah," Adam said sagely, "now that's not true. You hooked up with me in January—"

There was a sound like someone in the room had choked on their drink. Given his position as a superior to everyone he'd managed to gather there except Lil, Adam chose to ignore it in favor of imparting some wisdom.

"That never happened," Kris pointed out matter-of-factly before Adam could continue.

"You had sex with your _assistant_?" Taylor asked, aghast. "Is that even legal?"

"It's a _metaphor_," Adam explained, enunciating, and turned back to Kris. "I was your rebound fuck. _Job_," he corrected upon Lil's glower. "That doesn't count as a beginning. Then you went back to your _ex-fiancée_, and then she left you, and then you came back here and started working for me in April. Your contract is a year old, and I wanted to celebrate a year of having a decent assistant and thank you for not having sucked up to me and then gone behind my back and attempted to sue for sexual harassment that never happened." Adam leaned back in his chair and smiled ruefully. "Though, now that I think about it, maybe I should have sent something to Katy for throwing you back at me."

Kris gaped at him. "That's not how it—" he tried. Then, "Never mind."

"Never mind," Adam echoed. "Does that mean you agree with me?"

"It means 'let's fix this goddamned speech so I can take a nap', Adam, that's what it means," said Kris, and it was probably a bad thing that him leaving the room made Adam feel like a weight had been lifted off his brain.

He might as well make the most of it.

~

Adam was almost done putting a pile of letters away when Kris dropped by his office.

"I thought you'd gone home already," said Adam, leaping to his feet and turning around to lean back against the edge of his desk.

"You're on my way out," Kris explained. He sat on a chair nearby and looked up at Adam through sleepy lashes. "If there was such a thing as a—" Kris raised his eyebrows and raised his fingers to form airquotes, "'work anniversary', ours would be in January."

"That was a trial run," Adam clarified. "As I was saying before the Propriety Brigade jumped in, it's like if you hook up with someone at a party and then that person goes off and gets back with his boyfriend and two months later decides he's ready to date you. You don't celebrate the drunken hookup, and I'm not going to celebrate your trial run. Believe me, I know what I'm talking about."

"Maybe if you didn't screw people on the rebound you wouldn't see it that way," Kris remarked. There was some bite to it, and Adam felt a little taken aback for a moment before figuring out a way to derail the course of the conversation into the kind of lighthearted territory where they could joke around again.

"Oh, was that worry and affection?" Adam gasped in mock awe. "That deserves an extra matching trash can, at _least_. And an umbrella stand."

"I don't own an umbrella," Kris said, taking the chance Adam had offered him to acquiesce in Adam's decision to mark April 4 as a day to commemorate, or at least stop acting like it was somehow offensive. Adam had collected all kinds of made-up holidays along the course of his life and Kris had adapted to the ones he'd been around for this year pretty fucking well.

"And I do love it when you get all wet, but it's inappropriate to ogle, and the temptation detracts from my efficiency as Deputy Chief of Staff. The employees get the wrong idea."

"That you're a pervert?"

"No. Yes," Adam admitted, smiling lightly. "Also that it's okay to flirt with my assistant."

"Because it's obviously not," Kris said, eyebrows raised.

"Obviously," said Adam quietly. It came out lower and more perfunctory and _telling_ than he had intended, but Kris had been on the receiving end of Adam's occasional moments of unintentional stupidity several times before and never seemed to judge him for it, so it just felt like he could finally breathe.

The wind blustered against the blinds almost wildly, a little lost and surprised. Adam could almost feel the chill down his spine, determined to bring him back to life, or awareness.

"I think you're under this impression that you—that this job was my second choice or something," Kris said, eyes narrowed as though assessing the situation, Adam's reaction.

Adam shrugged. "You left when your girlfriend took you back and came back when she left you. I'm not a math person, but it's not that hard to put two and two together."

"It wasn't like that," said Kris, shaking his head offhandedly. "I didn't just lose my choice life and picked this one as backup."

"I'm not saying that," Adam muttered. "But you made it sound a whole lot like that."

Kris laughed self-depreciatingly, and Adam sat up, fixed his gaze on him and waited. He hadn't gotten much out of asking point black all evening, so he stayed silent for a few seconds.

"It's stupid," Kris began. "Okay, Katy didn't break up with me. I broke up with her." Adam's eyes widened, and Kris hastened to add, "It wasn't anything, really, it was just—we were walking home this one day, and it was really cold, and she was just wearing a shirt so she was probably freezing, and I was just—walking and not talking because it always seemed to get awkward when we talked. And then I got home, and I took off my jacket, and I realized it hadn't even occurred to me to give it to her. And I just realized if I had stopped paying attention only two months after we got back together, there was no way we were ready for a freaking _wedding_." Kris inhaled noticeably. "And then she took off her ring and said she agreed. And I moved back here."

Adam frowned—he'd always known there was something more to Kris's _she broke up with me_ excuse, because there was always a reason or a catalyst to that sort of life change. He hadn't expected something so undramatic, though, and it felt good to know Kris had had the chance to make a conscious decision. That he'd chosen this over trying to salvage a relationship that seemed to have meant so much to him.

"The coat stand just reminded me of that," Kris went on. "It's stupid. It was a nice gift."

Adam nodded in acknowledgment. A part of him wanted to say something stupidly assertive like _of course it was, I picked it out_, and another part of him wanted to say something poignant, and the second he opened his mouth he knew both lines of thought were about to collide into some kind of wreck.

"Well," he said finally, rising to his full height, "you don't have to worry about me getting cold."

"'Cause you're immune to the elements?"

"That is a valid theory," Adam said, "but also, you know, I would _ask_." It sounded a bit like an accusation, so he added, "Since it's kind of your job to do as I bid and everything," and felt relieved when Kris laughed heartily.

"I don't remember that being in my job description," Kris said, amusement turning into a strange sort of sincere sobriety, "but I doubt there'd come a point where you'd have to ask."

His voice had turned low, almost uncomfortably honest, a raw tone that seemed to mean more than just the words he was saying.

Adam hardly ever got to hear that voice, which was all for the better, because, every time he did, he felt it down to his toes.

It sounded like an invitation neither one of them was ready to redeem, but something about it made Adam feel like he wasn't wasting his life away in an office, and all those missed phone calls and meaningless sex and heartbreak might be leading up to something. Something worth patience and trouble.

"I'm glad you told me that," said Adam.

Kris snorted tiredly and said, "I'll probably regret it in the morning, but I'm glad I told you too. I think," and walked out of the room.

**Author's Note:**

> The title means "what is asserted without reason can be denied without reason". I'm not being randomly pretentious; The West Wing has a load of episodes named after Latin phrases. The episode this mirrors, in case you didn't notice straightaway, is 2.18 _17 People_.


End file.
